The Falling Woman (5 page)

"I'm looking for Elizabeth Butler," I said. "I'm her daughter, Diane Butler. Is she here?"

He took one hand from his pocket to push his straw hat farther back on his head. His eyes were blue and curious. "I see," he said. "Well." A pause. "Then perhaps you'd better let the taxi go." Another pause. "Liz didn't tell me that you were coming."

"She didn't know."

"Ah." He nodded.

"Is she here?"

"She's swimming. I'll send someone down to get her." He turned and looked toward the huts. A man was strolling across the plaza toward us. "Hey, John," the old man called. "Could you go get Liz? She has a visitor."

Behind me, the cabby was pulling my suitcase from the trunk. He set it in the dust beside me and said something in Spanish. I fumbled for money, grateful to be able to look away from the old man's eyes for a moment. The cab wheeled around in another cloud of dust and left me there.

The man took my arm in one hand and my suitcase in the other. "You must be hot and thirsty. I'll fix you a drink while we wait for your mother."

"I guess she'll be surprised to see me," I said. I tried to ignore the tears that had started to spill over. I wasn't even sure why I had started crying.

He wrapped a warm, dusty arm around my shoulders. "Take it easy now. It'll be okay."

I could not stop. The tears seemed to come of their own volition, through no fault of mine, and his voice seemed very far away. The bandanna he gave me smelled of dust.

"I'll make you something to drink and you can tell me about all this." He turned me around gently and started me walking.

"Sorry ..." The word caught in my throat and I couldn't say more.

"Nothing to be sorry about," he said, and he kept his arm around my shoulders. He led me across a central plaza and into one of the huts. The curtain that blocked the doorway fell closed behind us.

His hut was a single whitewashed room, furnished with two lawn chairs, a cooler, a footlocker, a small folding table that served as a desk, and a hammock that was looped over the hut's center beam and pushed to one side of the room. Half the hut was filled with cardboard boxes, picks, jacks, and shovels.

He made me sit in one of the lawn chairs, rummaged in a footlocker for plastic cups, and then in the cooler for a bottle of gin. "I'm Anthony Baker," he told me. "Call me Tony. If you're Liz's daughter, you'll drink gin and tonic."

I nodded and tried to smile. I was having no more success now than I had had outside. The smile kept twisting on my face and turning into something else.

Tony poured two drinks and fished in the bottom of the cooler for ice cubes. I studied his face when he handed me a glass. He looked like someone's favorite uncle. He sat in the other lawn chair and rested his drink on one knee, his hand on the other.

"Do you get many unexpected visitors?" I asked.

"Not many."

I took a sip. The drink was strong and tasted faintly of melted ice and plastic. "Sorry to take up your time," I said.

"No problem. I've got plenty of time," he said. "That's one thing archaeologists come to understand.

We've got time. The ruins have been here for thousands of years; they'll wait a little longer." He studied my face over the rim of his glass. "Being in the Yucatán for a while will change your view of time. The people who live here think like archaeologists. Two thousand years ago, their great-great-grandfathers burned over a plot of land in the monte and planted corn with a digging stick. This spring, Salvador will burn over a plot of land in the monte and plant com with a digging stick. People who work on such a grand time scale don't worry so much about how long it takes to have a drink with the daughter of an old friend." He shrugged.

"You stay here a while, and you learn that attitude. You learn to take your time."

I looked down at my drink, turning the plastic glass in my hands. "I had to talk to my mother," I said. "I know I should have written or called or something, but ..." I shrugged. "It's pretty weird just showing up here with no warning."

"Some people say it's strange for a grown man to spend his summers digging in the dirt. Personally, I try to avoid making value judgments."

"I should have written first," I said.

"I don't see that it's a real problem," he said. "We can always string another hammock. You can learn to sleep in a hammock, can't you?"

I nodded.

He took the empty glass from my hand and poured me another drink without asking if I wanted one. I was taking my first sip when I heard footsteps outside the hut, a knock on the wooden doorjamb. "Hey, Tony," a woman's voice said. "What's this about a visitor?"

The blaze of light when the curtain was lifted aside blinded me for a moment. I blinked, staring toward the figure in the doorway.

My mother's hair had more white in it than I remembered. Her hair was damp, the tendrils curling on her neck as they dried. She carried a towel slung over her shoulder.

She was frowning. I tried to smile, but once again, I had lost the knack. "Hello," I said. "Surprise." I stood up, feeling awkward. I did not know what to do with my hands. She looked worried, I thought, in that first moment. Startled and worried, not angry.

"Diane?" she said. "Are you all right? What the hell are you doing here?"

Tony was making himself busy, pouring another drink.

"My father's dead," I said. "He died two weeks ago." I did not cry and my voice was steady. I waited for a reaction, but my mother's expression did not change. She sat down on the edge of the footlocker.

"I see," she said.

"He died of a heart attack." I was talking too fast, but I could not seem to stop. "I wanted to talk to you.

Dad never wanted me to talk to you. I thought 1 could come and stay here for a while."

"Here?" She still looked worried, a little puzzled. "For a while," she said. "I suppose you could."

"She could take the place of that student of mine who cancelled," Tony said, handing her a gin and tonic.

"Don't you think? We'll teach you to sort potsherds," he said to me.

I was watching my mother. She nodded cautiously and accepted the drink that Tony had mixed. Did she look relieved? Annoyed? Concerned? I could not read her face.

"Do you want to do that, Diane?"

"I'd like to try it," I said. "I promise I won't be in the way. I'll be no trouble at all. Really."

Tony sat in the lawn chair and my mother sat on the footlocker and they talked about which hut I would stay in, which work crew I would be assigned to, and other inconsequentials. I held my glass and watched my mother's face and hands as she talked. For the moment, I relaxed.

Before dinner, my mother took me on a tour of the central part of the ruins. She walked at a brisk pace, talking about people who had been dead for over a thousand years. She seemed quite fond of these dead people. As she walked, she looked at the rocks around us, at the trees, at the ground beneath our feet. She did not look at my face—she did not seem to be avoiding my eyes; she just found the rocks and trees and barren ground more interesting than me. Her straw hat shaded her face. She wore khaki pants and a baggy long-sleeved shirt.

We walked past a low wall and a crumbling fragment of an archway. "The old church," my mother said.

"The Spanish built it with Indian labor and the Mayan temple stones."

She spoke in fragments: short bursts of information, a verbal shorthand that eliminated the little words that slow a sentence down. Her way of speaking seemed to match her general attitude; she seemed to be overflowing with the willingness to act, to start new projects, to finish up old ones, to clear jungles and build pyramids. She was a head shorter than me, but I had to work to match her pace.

"Just found an interesting possibility over there," she said, gesturing vaguely. "Underground chamber, I think. We'll start working on that Monday."

The sun reflected off the rocks and I was grateful for my sunglasses. The sky was an uninterrupted blue; no clouds, no hope of shade. Even the jungle did not look cool: the trees looked thirsty and worn. The path was flanked by mounds of rubble from which trees sprouted.

"You'll need a hat," my mother said, glancing at me. "Keep the sun off, or you'll end up with a stroke.

You can pick one up in the market."

I nodded quickly, aware that this was the first time she had acknowledged that I would be staying for a time. At the hut, Tony had made suggestions as to where I would stay, what I could do. My mother had simply agreed.

"I didn't know that it would be this hot," I said.

"Sometimes it's not," she said. "Sometimes it's hotter." She flashed me a quick smile, so quick that when it was gone I could scarcely believe I had seen it at all. "When the rains come, it gets stickier, but stays just as hot." She lifted off her hat and ran a hand back through her hair without hesitating or breaking stride.

I had seen pictures of the ruins at Chichén Itzá, Copán, and Palenque: great crumbling heaps of blocky stones, nearly hidden beneath tropical bromeliads and drooping vines; massive pyramids and sculpted facades; tremendous stone heads that glowered from the lush vegetation. I had expected gloom and mystery, the promise of secrets. Here, the sun was too bright for secrets. I could see no pyramids.

At the end of the path we followed, a small building constructed of sand-colored stone stood atop a low platform. The building was a box with a flat roof. On top of the box was another smaller box. On top of that, a third box. Like a stack of three building blocks: big, medium, and small. Except for the roof, the building looked like a child's drawing of a house: a neat flat wall with a dark rectangle for the door, two square windows.

"... Temple of the Seven Dolls," my mother was saying. "Only building that's been reconstructed. We're working on some of the outlying temples over that way." Another vague wave of her hand toward the setting sun.

I followed her up the steps of the Temple of the Seven Dolls. Two pigeons flew away as we approached the top. "You'll see some bees," my mother said. "They have a hive in one of the beams."

We reached the top. My mother sat down on the top step on one side of the open door where the building shaded her from the sun. "Take a rest," she suggested. I hesitated for a moment, wondering if this were some kind of test. Maybe I should want to explore the building before I rested. Maybe I should ask questions, not just sit.

I sat on the other side of the doorway and looked out in the direction of camp.

My mother lifted a pack of cigarettes from her pocket, tapped one out, and offered me the pack. I shook my head and she set it on the steps beside her.

"Bad habit, I know," she said, lighting the cigarette and leaning back against the side of the door. "Tony's been trying to get me to quit for the last five years." She shrugged. "At my age, it doesn't seem worth it."

Chapter Three: Elizabeth

O
n the steps of the Temple of the Seven Dolls, an elderly diviner was casting the
mixes,
the sacred red beans that told the future. His customer was a merchant, a sharp-faced man whose arms and face were tattooed with patterns of swirling lines. A woven bag filled with cacao beans lay on the steps beside him.

The old diviner pointed at the red beans that lay on the cloth before him and spoke softly. I could not make out the words.

I took a long drag on my cigarette and wondered what I could say to this young woman who had dropped into my life so unexpectedly. What did she want of me?

She sat with her back to the open doorway; her knees were bent and her arms were wrapped around them. She was prettier than any child of mine had a right to be: her red hair, fair skin, and slim build marked her as Robert's daughter. She wore jeans and an open-necked white shirt. Her eyes were hidden by dark glasses and her hair was tied back in a single braid. "Is it what you expected?" I asked her, waving the cigarette at the camp, the jungle, the overgrown mounds, the diviner and his customer.

"I didn't really know what to expect," she said cautiously.

Robert's daughter: he had probably trained her to be careful, to admit to little. That had been his style: he was careful; he always had to be the one in the know. He had kept himself in check, always carefully controlled.

"Do you want to tell me about how Robert died?" I asked. I tried to speak gently, but the words sounded harsh. I am not good at these things; I deal with dead people better than I do with live ones.

Diane was looking out toward the camp, her chin up, her jaw set. "He died of a heart attack ... his third one. He was playing tennis at the club."

It seemed an appropriate way for Robert to die. I hadn't seen him for at least five years, but I could imagine him at fifty: out on the court in his tennis whites, smiling his pleasant professional smile, his hair touched with gray at the temples, but nowhere else. I wondered who he had been playing: a colleague from the hospital, a pretty young woman. It didn't matter. I could not manage much sorrow over his death.

During divorce proceedings, Robert and I had come to treat each other with a hard-edged polished courtesy. Over the past twenty-five years, that glossy politeness had marked all our infrequent contacts, until at last it seemed like the natural relationship between us. He was a stranger, a vague acquaintance I had once known better. I did not hate him, did not even dislike him particularly, though I did find him dull and opinionated. I could remember the distant times when arguments with him had made me furious, but the fire had burned to ashes and the ashes had blown away on the evening wind. I was indifferent toward him.

"The funeral was two weeks ago," she said. "Aunt Alicia set it up. I guess she didn't let you know."

I remembered Alicia, Robert's older sister, a widow with a smooth, uncrackable personality. I tapped the ash off the end of my cigarette and nodded. "Alicia and I were never exactly friends."

"I know it must be really strange, my turning up out of the blue like this. It's just that Dad never wanted me to talk to you. He never wanted me to know anything about you." She spoke quickly, as if she had to say this quickly or not at all. Her voice had an edge of urgency. "I've read all your books." When she said the last few words, her voice softened and took on a pleading note. She wanted my approval; she wanted me to like her.